Soviet Union His Vision Thing

By Bruce W. Nelan

Anxiety and apprehension seem to pervade Moscow whenever Mikhail Gorbachev is out of town. But for much of August, with the Soviet President off on his annual vacation in the Crimea, the capital showed symptoms of panic. Conservative members of the Politburo were warning that the country could be slipping out of control. Government officials were speculating openly about the possibility of a coup. A rock group climbed the Soviet hit parade with a song whose refrain was "We are anticipating civil war." Arriving home, Gorbachev, looking tanned and vigorous after four weeks on the Black Sea shore, went straight to the Kremlin television studio and accused conservatives and radicals of creating an atmosphere of "despair and uncertainty."

Mikhail Sergeyevich the political wizard was back onstage. With seeming effortlessness, he cashiered three full members and two nonvoting members of the ruling Politburo, foot draggers all, and promoted to their posts four men he apparently considers more reliable. He won unanimous approval of his compromise plan to bring forward the next party congress to October 1990 so he can purge still more recalcitrants on the 251-member Central Committee. With Gorbachev flexing his muscles, talk of a coup -- at least the Kremlin-corridor variety that ousted Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 -- appeared misplaced. But at the same time his virtuoso display of political control highlighted a central question: If he can hire and fire the country's most powerful men, why hasn't perestroika -- his plan to restructure the economy -- paid off in the currency the country demands, a better standard of living for Soviet citizens?

Gorbachev did his star turn during a two-day Central Committee meeting in Moscow that was 18 months in the planning. It focused on the ominous wave of nationalism that refuses to ebb: resurgent independence movements in the Baltic states, the Ukraine and Moldavia; rioting and murder among rival ethnic groups in the southern republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Uzbekistan, in which at least 232 people have been killed in the past 18 months.

It would have been unrealistic to expect the plenum to resolve chronic problems of empire that have bedeviled Czars and party leaders alike. Nevertheless, the outcome was noticeably flat and predictable. The party's new platform offered vague promises of economic and cultural autonomy to the 15 national republics but warned that secession or the revision of borders was unacceptable. Violence would be met with the "full force of Soviet laws," the platform warned. Yet all this has been said before, and seems unlikely to end the fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh or cool the breakaway passions in the Baltic states. On Friday the Lithuanian Communist Party defied Moscow with a declaration that it is "seeking independence in the course of perestroika."

Gorbachev used the close of the Central Committee plenum to purge one- quarter of the twelve voting members of the Politburo. He ousted three aging conservatives: Ukrainian party chief Vladimir Shcherbitsky, 71; former KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov, 66; and agriculture specialist Viktor Nikonov, 60. Gorbachev's main nemesis, Yegor Ligachev, 68, stays on, but Western diplomats believe it suits the President to have a significant figure to his right as a counterweight to Boris Yeltsin on his left so he can bill himself as a middle-of-the-roader. Gorbachev promoted new KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, 65, and chief economic planner Yuri Maslyukov, 51. While both are considered supporters of perestroika, they are also veteran members of the party apparat, come from the same ideological mold as the men they replaced and give no hint of brilliance.

Plainly Gorbachev is hamstrung by the narrow pool of party cadres he has to choose from and uncertainty over who is capable of putting his plans into action and managing them effectively. In fact, the purged Nikonov was appointed by Gorbachev with high hopes just three years ago. Moreover, Gorbachev has never had the vast party bureaucracy and probably not even a majority of the Central Committee fully behind him.

But more important, it is not clear that he has a detailed vision of what kind of system he wants to replace the old one with -- a free market economy, a form of democratic socialism or simply a more efficient state monopoly. At last week's meeting, Gorbachev dismissed all claims "that we are unable to resolve problems facing the country without introducing capitalism into the economy." So far, though, perestroika has been a series of slogans rather than a well-structured set of programs. American Sovietologist Abraham Becker of the Rand Corp. concludes that Gorbachev came to power with a narrow view of the country's problem and what was needed to reform it. "He believed erroneously that drastic but elementary personnel changes, a shaking up of the cadres, would turn around the bureaucracy," says Becker. The Carnegie Endowment's Dimitri Simes thinks time for such tinkering is running out. "Gorbachev has to decide what kind of Soviet Union he wants, what kind of vision for it he has," Simes says.

Soviet and foreign analysts disagree on whether ethnic turmoil or economic failure is the greater threat to Gorbachev. There is no doubt, though, that the peril is real. "Even after this week," observed former British Ambassador to Washington Sir Oliver Wright, "the odds are against him." A Soviet political scientist in Moscow, Yevgeni Ambartsumov, is equally grim. "The threat of economic collapse exists," he says. "Things are getting worse."

There is no shortage of suggestions on what Gorbachev should do. Western economists advise some breathtakingly sweeping changes: decontrol prices, end huge state subsidies, expand the private sector, open a capital market with realistic interest rates. Soviet specialists call for something more elusive: effective leadership. Says Oleg Bogomolov, director of Moscow's Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System: "To sustain perestroika, a new speedup, more radical change, is required." Gorbachev, adds Ambartsumov, "talks too much and doesn't carry through his decisions."

With hindsight, some British experts suspect that Gorbachev was led into fundamental errors by his own dynamism, self-confidence and impatience. Says a senior British official: "He moved on all fronts simultaneously, which has confronted him with all the country's problems at once." Many Soviet scholars regard the party bureaucracy as the main obstacle to reform and argue that Gorbachev, despite top-level housecleaning, has so far failed to sweep out conservatives and dead wood at the middle and local levels, where things get done -- or don't. Others say glasnost unleashed pent-up ethnic resentment. By attacking across the board, Gorbachev only produced confusion, resistance and rampant nationalism. Says a Foreign Office expert in London: "You don't have to be a Soviet conservative to think he should have exercised more control."

Ironically, that is exactly what he did in applying perestroika to foreign affairs. Gorbachev knew where he wanted to go and how to get there. He moved first to improve U.S.-Soviet relations, which he considered pivotal. To prove his bona fides, he withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan and supported regional settlements in Africa and Latin America. He followed up by renouncing intervention in the affairs of Eastern Europe. His steady march toward nuclear-arms reduction often caught the U.S. off guard and vastly impressed Western Europe. His sure hand on foreign policy has been so convincing that some American congressional leaders are complaining that the Bush Administration is responding too tentatively.

But Gorbachev could still overestimate the practical value of a warmer relationship with the U.S. Like so many foreign leaders with domestic problems, Gorbachev might be looking to Washington to bail him out of his crisis with pledges of cooperation and signs of acceptance. That would be a mistake. Not even a series of major triumphs abroad could compensate for the lack of a blueprint to make perestroika work at home.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Moscow and William Mader/London